IF the Indian republic is to be saved from the ravaging of its soul by the dangerously divisive project of citizenship rights graded by one’s religious identity, which the Union government has launched, a nationwide move-ment of civil disobedience of the kind led by Mahatma Gandhi has become imperative.

After the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) became the law of the land, India has veered dangerously and decisively away from the humane and inclusive nationhood that lay at the core of its struggle for freedom. The imagination, the pledge and the aspiration that India would be a country which would belong equally in every way to people of diverse faiths, constituted the core of its Constitution. With the weaponized trinity of the CAA, the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC), and the National Population Register (NPR), that core has caved in because people of just one religious heritage, India’s Muslims, were placed lower than people of every other religious identity in a new graded hierarchy of citizenship.

This was the most decisive marker so far of India hurtling into becoming a Hindu nation. The Indian people could not rely on its political opposition to fight or resist this mounting catastrophe. The opposition lacks not just the numbers; its true failing at this moment of independent India’s history, when the people of India need it most, is its famine of moral and political convictions.

Many of us have approached the courts to challenge the Citizenship Amendment Act on constitutional grounds. But in the end, it was left to the people of India to defend the Constitution and the secular republic, because the battle is not just legal and constitutional, it is political and moral. That the people of India must fight in defence of the Constitution is fitting, because it is ‘We the People’ who gave unto ourselves the Constitution. We must fight by means that are entirely non-violent and democratic.

 

What form of democratic non-violent resistance could the people of India mount to challenge this law, which in many ways marks the extinction of the Constitution? I have agonized and struggled for answers. I first looked at what we could learn from Mahatma Gandhi and the path of civil disobedience. In 1930, Gandhiji disobeyed the colonial law prohibiting the production of salt by marching to the beach in Dandi to make salt by evaporating salt water. He was arrested and spent a year in jail. With him, 60,000 Indians were imprisoned for the crime of making salt.

Gandhiji taught us that if citizens seek to fight an unjust law with truth and non-violence, they must disobey it. This disobedience should be defiant, public and performative. However, such disobedience in itself would not be enough. A satyagrahi who breaks an unjust law must not just accept, but demand punishment for breaking the law. Without self-suffering, disobedience loses its moral force. The state must, in this way, be presented with only two options. One, to punish the person who rebelliously defies the law. The alternative would be to abrogate the unjust law. The state should not be left with a third option.

The satyagraha against the CAA-NRIC-NPR trinity could best take the form of a call to boycott the NPR and NRIC and refuse to divulge any information or present any documents before the NPR enumerators and NRIC officials. But the moral and political conundrum that confronts us if we adopt this path of civil disobedience is that only India’s Muslims would suffer punishment, which could include being interned for long years in detention centres, and being stripped-off citizenship rights, including the right to vote, to own property and access social security from the state.

For non-Muslims who boycott the NPR and NRIC, it is unlikely that there will be any terminally adverse consequences (of being deprived citizenship and sent to detention centres), because the law is designed precisely to treat them as persecuted minorities and award them Indian citizenship. The satyagraha of civil disobedience would have no moral salience if the satyagrahi is not punished by the state for disobedience.

 

I knew that there was a need to look further for inspiration and guidance. I found some answers in the praxis of public resistance within the unlikely shores of today’s United States of America.

One of the first Presidential orders of Donald Trump in January 2017 was to suspend the entry of people into the U.S. from a number of Muslim countries. Within hours of this announcement, American airports filled up with protesters expressing their solidarity with those Muslim travellers who were halted by immigration authorities. They held aloft banners with slogans like ‘No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here’, ‘You are welcome’, and even ‘We are all Muslims’.

Residents in mixed neighbourhoods knocked on the doors of their Muslim neighbours with reassuring messages of friendship and acceptance. Christian and Jewish faith leaders declared solidarity with those affected by Trump’s ban. They spoke of their ‘moral obligation to ‘welcome the stranger’, that denying people a place of ‘safety will not make our nation safer’, and that the ban echoed ‘fears that guided past discrimination against other religious communities such as Catholics and, disastrously, Jews in the years before Nazi Germany.’

But I was most inspired by a tweet by Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, when she announced that she was ‘ready to register as Muslim.’ She noted on Twitter that she was ‘raised Catholic, became Episcopalian and found out later my family was Jewish. I stand ready to register as Muslim in #solidarity.’

 

These examples from two opposite corners of the world, separated by 90 years in time, illuminated the way to craft a possible path for civil disobedience against the CAA-NRIC-NPR. As stated, civil disobedience would be morally incomplete if one suffered no penalties for disobedience, while people of the persecuted identity ‘Muslim’ would. Perhaps one could remedy this by initiating civil disobedience by declaring oneself as a Muslim in official records. It could be the only way to be subjected to the same official consequences and penalties of boycotting the NRC as Muslims would be, after the passage of the CAB and its pernicious construction of graded citizenship.

I was born to devout Sikh parents, but am an agnostic and humanist. I do not believe in God or follow any religion, but I am at the same time committed to respecting the religious faith (or the denial of it) of all others as long as it encourages kindness, solidarity, equality, justice and peace. I announced that if the CAA became law, and the NRIC discriminated on the basis of religious identity, I would register for official purposes as Muslim, I would then refuse to submit any documents, and I would demand that I should be subjected to the same penalties as any undocumented Muslim. My intended official declaration of Muslim-hood does not alter my agnostic and humanist convictions in any way. I did not say that I intend, in protest, to convert to Islam (or any other faith). All I have declared is that I will register in government documents, which are designed to determine my eligibility for citizenship rights, as a Muslim in order to stand in solidarity with my Muslim sisters and brothers whose rights alone have been imperiled by this new law.

 

How does the state determine a person’s religious identity? It cannot be by looking at one’s name. I have friends of Muslim heritage, bearing Arabic names, who are avowed atheists. My Sikh parents named me Harsh Mander Singh (the Mander came from the middle name of my father Har Mander Singh). In my youth, Jayaprakash Narayan made an appeal to abandon that part of the name which divulges one’s caste or religion. Therefore, when I joined the IAS, I decided to drop ‘Singh’ from my name. (I persuaded three other colleagues in the service to do the same.)

To try and construct an even more syncretic identity, my wife and I gave our daughter an Arabic name, Suroor. A young Muslim colleague who was fond of me named his son Harsh. How will the state determine the religion of any of these persons by simply looking at their names, especially when religion will centrally determine their access to (or denial of) the rights of citizenship?

At present, the main official record of one’s religion is based on a self-declaration during the decennial census. This means that for official purposes, one’s religion will be what one chooses to register as. My resolve, therefore, is to officially register myself as a Muslim for purposes of citizenship determination.

 

Once I declare that the state must treat me as a Muslim, the moral pathway for my civil disobedience is clear. When I disobey by refusing to present any documents before the NRC, I will stand in truer solidarity with my Muslim sisters and brothers who are unable (or refuse) to produce the documents that establish their citizenship. I will then be able to demand, in the manner that Gandhiji taught us, that I be punished in exactly the same way as many undocumented Indian Muslims. If they are exiled in detention centres, I too will demand the same penalty for myself. If their citizenship rights of adult franchise or owning property are extinguished, then I too will demand that I should face the same penalties.

Maybe this is a dream; maybe it is not. This is the time for every Indian to decide the kind of India they wish to leave behind for their children. Is this an India that is proud and confident in its diversity, an India of kindness, equality, fairness and fraternity? Or is it an India that belongs to some while excluding others, violently and mercilessly, only because of the God they worship?

The struggle for freedom was not just a battle against British colonialism. It was also a battle for the kind of India we would construct. The first battle was accomplished in 1947. The second is still being waged. It will need to be fought in the streets and in our hearts. It is my hope that many will join this battle to claim the fraternity that Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar declared to be central to India’s constitutional morality. And tens of thousands did protest in myriad ways against a law which seeks to build a hierarchy of citizenship based on religion.

Mahatma Gandhi had taught us that if citizens wish to oppose a law, which they regard to be intolerably unjust and evil, the peaceful and non-violent way to resist is to refuse to cooperate with this law through civil disobedience. ‘Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good’, he declared. Civil disobedience is the active and public refusal of a citizen to obey laws, demands, orders or commands of a government which is regarded to be unjust. Inspired by Gandhiji, Martin Luther King Jr said a person must break ‘a law that conscience tells him (or her) is unjust.’ What is more, she should then ‘willingly accept the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law.’

Citizens, particularly students around the country, quickly recognized that if the Union government was allowed to proceed with the CAA-NRIC-NPR trio, it would destroy the constitutional pledges of the Indian republic – of equal rights, non-discrimination on the basis of religion, and secularism. Spontaneous protests spread rapidly to every corner of the country, led by the young, women and workers. Protesters held the national flag in one hand, and in the other posters rejecting the divisive agenda of the government, reading reverentially the preamble of the Constitution.

 

The rallying cry of the movement is ‘Hum kagaz nahi dikhayenge’ – ‘We refuse to show you our documents’. This civil disobedience was not just by people who are adversely targeted by the new law, mainly Muslims, but also those who would benefit by it. The spirit that permeated protests across the land is of solidarity, of reclaiming the idea of loving one’s country by loving its people, by standing shoulder to shoulder with people of every faith, caste, gender and class as equal and caring citizens. By standing together in this civil disobedience, they upheld the lustrous core of the Constitution, which is fraternity, the idea that we are all bound to and with each other, that injustice to any woman or man is injustice to us, that we must all take care of each other.

 

History will long remember this moment when its citizens pulled India back from the edge of fascism, through both the resolve of collective civil disobedience, and the public affirmation of their solidarity. By contrast, when Nazi Germany withdrew the citizenship rights of Jews, reducing them to ‘state subjects’, there were no protests by non-Jews, even as fascism made its advances (except once against laws when the Gestapo rounded up Jews who married non-Jews; and this public protest led to the spouses being returned).

However, this inspiring, indeed historic, citizen’s movement of civil disobedience and solidarity is unlikely to dent the hubris of the ruling Union government, or to compel it to pull back from its ruinous ideological project which they have unleashed, fraught with the memories and perils of India’s partition. The brute and targeted repression by the Uttar Pradesh government, and the ugly force used to crush students in universities, is only likely to exacerbate dangerously around the country in the weeks ahead.

Despite nationwide protests, mostly entirely peaceful, of a scale and spread unmatched since the freedom struggle, the Union government continued to signal its stubborn resolve to persist with its agenda. The Citizenship Amendment Act has been notified to commence from 10 January, and for the NPR, pilots have already started. It was due to be rolled out nationwide from April 2020. The covid-19 pandemic may delay its roll-out, but there is no indication of its withdrawal. Home Minister Amit Shah has refused to rule out the implementation of the NRIC in the future. In its affidavit in the Supreme Court, the Union government has spoken of the NRIC as being essential in the national interest. The CCA-NRIC-NPR are critical to the ideological project of the RSS-BJP combine.

What can stop the Union government in its tracks as it pursues its disastrous agenda could be a new form of civil disobedience, rarely, if ever, seen anywhere in the world. This is the federal pushback by state governments, a unique civil disobedience by state governments. The Union government can perhaps implement the CAA directly through its bureaucracy. But it cannot implement either the NRIC or the NPR unless the state governments join the massive operation, which would involve house-to-house collection of information.

 

It will be remembered that India’s political parties, except honorably the left and a few others, did not display the consistent moral and political commitment required to defend the republic and its constitutional morality at a time when they were most gravely threatened. Instead, they hedged, compromised and voted in support of the amended law for petty immediate political gains. It was only after the unexpected national protests that one by one, the non-BJP state governments (and even Bihar, which partners the BJP in the ruling alliance) announced that they would not implement the NRIC.

There is still the possibility that the states will not fully block the NPR, accepting at face value the Union government’s claim that the NPR is not connected with the NRIC, or that if it drops a few questions, it will become benign. This is again an official falsehood. The amendment to the citizenship law under the BJP government in 2003 laid the foundations for what is unfolding today. It laid down that a person cannot become an Indian citizen, even if born in India, if one parent is declared an ‘illegal citizen’.

Further, to identify ‘illegal citizens’ an NRIC would be prepared. The rules under the act lay down that the NPR would first be prepared as a comprehensive national record of residents, and from among them the executive would identify the ‘doubtful citizens’; and even other citizens could be identified as ‘doubtful citizens’. This opens the doors for a frightening kind of communal targeting by lower executives and communal organizations, which even the Assam NRC rarely gave space for.

 

If state governments still permit the NPR, they will in effect permit a process of communal targeting which will cause catastrophic suffering and potential disenfranchisement of millions of Indian Muslims, and a permanent dismembering of social harmony and justice. There can be no greater betrayal by them of the Constitution. Following the example of the Kerala state government, they must approach the Supreme Court for repeal of not just the CCA 2019, but also of the amendments of 2003, which provide for the NRIC and the NPR. If these are not struck down, the only path before them is to disobey the Union government, and even invite dismissal, as the cost of not permitting the destruction of the Constitution.

That will be unprecedented, and create a constitutional crisis. But paradoxically, it is only by creating such a constitutional crisis that the Constitution can be rescued from what would otherwise be a fatal blow to its foundational morality.